path: root/transcripts/bitcoin-network-longevity-summit/survey-responses.mdwn

Survey responses

How concerned are you about the lack of incentives for Bitcoin Core developers to continue their work on Bitcoin Core?

What kind of impact would negative headlines about bitcoin security vulnerabilities or an actual incident have on your company's bottom line? This one looks pretty severe. Some said no impact. Some said moderate impact. Some said high impact. If there is a problem with the security of the bitcoin network, then maybe the asset price goes to zero. This should be a conversation piece.

Is your company interested in collaborating on an initiative that would see companies funding the bitcoin developer network? 100% said yes. Would your company prefer to do this individually or a broad based advisory group? Some said joint strategy and 40% said they would prefer to support developers own activities. We use BRINK to find who to fund and validate and vet some people. Kind of like tinder, being able to scroll through developers and see their profiles. They did the heavy lifting of finding people and exposing the information.

What about anonymous developers in the space? What was the number of anonymous developers in this space? What about pseudonymous number of developers currently funded? Maybe just one of the 40 people. It is good to have pseudonymous developers because it increases resiliency against law enforcement, regulation, etc.

What would be the ideal number of developers? I don't know if I would feel comfortable giving an answer to that. I think the rate of change of number of developers shouldn't be large. I'm more passionate that the rate of change needs to be steady and slower. Turnover also rolls into that. I think adding 2-3 developers/year would be a great goal. Part of this is to replace developers who are metriculating out or whatever, and the other reason is to slightly grow the project. Someone else gave a 10x10 matrix as an ideal funding structure where you have 10 funding organizations each funding 10 developers for 100 developers. I don't think 100 developers is the magic number there.

What is the turnover per year? I think we gain about 2 and we probably lose 1.5 developers or something. The total numebr of developers seems to be detached from the price of bitcoin itself. I think that's okay, we probably want to grow it a little bit.

There is no project plan and then allocating resources to that. What about geographic distribution? It's about 40% North America, 40% Europe, and then a few in Latin America or South America. Any in Africa? There's one guy.

Have you had to fire anyone? How do you measure? Separate from our board, we have a grant committee with specialized engineer talent on it to review work. There has been at least one case where there was an underperforming grantee who was not renewed. There have been other situations where we haven't renewed a grantee but not for performance reasons except for that one case.

Is your company interested in serving in a leadership role on an advisory group for funding Bitcoin Core? Yes.

Is your opinion on establishing a 501(c)3 to support education and funding of this work?

Sounds like there's a lot of non-profits in existence that might be appropriate for this. Maybe we need a mechanism or a shared understanding of how best to contribute attention and resources.

Many organizations represented would gather based on guidance, a list of organizations funding Core developers and create a micro-site to draw attention to it, like which organizations are doing great work and let's support them accordingly. Which organizations should this be directed to? This would help build awareness and solve the collective action problem that you alluded to.

Is there a particular jurisdiction you prefer to work out? North America? Wherever it is required I'm happy to travel to have my organization supported.

What if we can have Bitcoin Magazine people point attention to this during Nashville this year? They would be all over that. They have a nice war chest at this point. David Bailey mentioned it preivously on twitter about them donating some small percent of their ticket sales and it would be $1m. That was last year. I haven't got a call this year to collect that check.

In the DeFi world, what if someone was donating to bitcoin developers?

In addition to listing out companies and charities, what about a list of all the miners, ETFs, exchanges that are contributing? What about providing a little bit of.. there's philanthropy, it's Core Scientific donating not because they want attention but it may soften the blow contributing profits to core development. What about a badge to put on their website? Give them some marketing materials.

You could envision mining industry and then a bunch of pledges that are there, and then to the logo of who they pledged to, ETFs, you could see exchanges, and they could start to get momentum and some social proof going on there.

Who makes money in bitcoin? Bitmain. Miners. Pools. People who make miners. Exchanges. Derivatives exchanges. Tether. That's the best business in crypto, maybe in the world. Tether should be targeted for funding developers. Okay, we did it. We solved it.

Public survey would also be useful instead of having a private survey.

On the topic of keeping things decentralized... what if the NGOs can recruit developers for us to put on our payroll, and we pay and fund a developer on our payroll? We could make a 3-year commitment. What if we could take developers from the public and put them in that format? We wouldn't know where to go. We wouldn't know how to vet them. We need those presented to us as options.

Yes, I personally have a list. But it gets into the-- similar thing with the org choice, which orgs do you donate to? Someone needs to surface information about those orgs and similarly with the devs if you go that route, someone needs to collect information about those developers. Maybe a few people could help facilitate that. If there were like 2 or 3 that had jobs, we could package that up and blast that email to the 40 and say hey just so you know this is availalbe or some such thing like that to get their awareness.

What if I brought you 10 organizations and each one gave a job and position to a core developer where would we find those 10 developers? They would be 100% committed to Bitcoin Core and not working on other commercial activity. All these orgs have a vested interest in seeing bitcoin survive.

How would the developers respond to that? Some of them will not want to lose what they already have. Some of them want to keep working at Chaincode or something. But maybe some of the remote grantees would consider employment. It's a new concept. I think it's a great idea. I just don't know how the developers would react. I think you would have a few that would jump on. I don't know if you would get 10 or 15 people.

Is there a way to survey them? Is this a conversation with them? I could reach out. It would be nice to have information about the number of organizations before I throw that out as a thing to them. Would it be $250,000/year? What would keep them around? There is also a mentorship angle here as well.

Also needs to be money for travel, meetings, bug bounties, code audits, new recruits, training, documentation, education, etc. One way to distribute money though is to have in-house engineers. Maybe I can find you 5, or even 10 different job positions.

Optech was formed to help that communication between industry and developers. There's no better resource than having someone on your team that can represent the latest and greatest of the technicals to the business but also the business feedback on things to developers. I don't mean protocol changes but just usage of the node software in general.

Bitcoin Core developers used to be miners but they aren't now. So miners would be a soft target for this. All their income comes from this. A month to get back to us with a response on job openings?

The pledge should be one developer at minimum.

If industry takes on some of the existing developers, it's an orthogonal concern to any new developers coming in. I think the trend is that younger developers would go to an org for some sort of mentorship and leveling up.

There's no silver bullet for the maintainers not agreeing with you and merging your stuff. If there are developers employed in industry, then I hope their motivations would be transparent and the communication lines would be better than ever so that a big project gets shocked and surprised that-- there should be ideally more communication before that ever happens. Embedding people in the industry should cause this to happen less, in theory.

It should be more like a tenured professor rather than an employee. Maybe don't have the developers in those jobs sign non-disparagement agreements. They need to be able to speak up about their incentives or any pressures they are receiving from their employers or funders. The internet is learning about these agreements right now because of what OpenAI is going through. Also don't make their pay contingent on being able to get consensus changes merged.